X fanatic and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it unattainable to find out whether or not social media posts are actually written by people, he posted.

The conclusion got here whereas studying (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which had been praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software program programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in Could.

These days, that subreddit has been so crammed with posts from self-proclaimed Code customers asserting that they moved to Codex that one Reddit person even joked: “Is it potential to change to codex with out posting a subject on Reddit?”

This left Altman questioning what number of of these posts had been from actual people. “I’ve had the strangest expertise studying this: I assume it’s all pretend/bots, though on this case I do know codex development is de facto robust and the development right here is actual,” he confessed on X.

He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I believe there are a bunch of issues occurring: actual folks have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extraordinarily On-line crowd drifts collectively in very correlated methods, the hype cycle has a really ‘it’s so over/we’re so again’ extremism, optimization stress from social platforms on juicing engagement and the associated manner that creator monetization works, different firms have astroturfed us so i’m further delicate to it, and a bunch extra (together with in all probability some bots).”

To decode that slightly, he’s accusing people of beginning to sound like LLMs, though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — had been actually invented to imitate human communication, proper right down to the em sprint. And OpenAI’s fashions positively educated on Reddit, the place Altman was a board member via 2022, and was disclosed as a big shareholder through the firm’s IPO final yr.

He makes a legitimate level that fandoms, led by extraordinarily, always-on social media customers, do are likely to behave in odd methods. Many teams can devolve into hatefests if overrun by these venting frustrations to their brethren.

Altman additionally throws a dig on the incentives when social media websites and creators depend on engagement to earn cash. Truthful sufficient.

However then Altman confesses that one of many causes he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts on this subreddit is perhaps bots is as a result of OpenAI has additionally been “astroturfed.” That usually includes posts by folks or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor believable deniability.

We now have no proof of astroturfing (although it’s potential). However we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the corporate after it launched GPT 5.0. As an alternative of waves of reward from the trustworthy over the brand new mannequin, many offended posts had been voted up. Individuals took to Reddit and X to complain about all the things from GPT’s character to the way it burned via credit with out ending duties.

A day after the bumpy launch, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT wherein he confessed to rollout points and promised modifications. The GPT subreddit has by no means totally recovered its earlier stage of affection, with customers nonetheless posting recurrently on how a lot they dislike the modifications with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman appears to indicate, pretend in a roundabout way?

Altman surmises, “The online impact is in some way AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very pretend in a manner it actually didn’t a yr or two in the past.”

If that’s true, who’s fault is it? GPT has led fashions to turn into so good at writing, that LLMs have turn into a plague not simply to social media websites (which have all the time had a bot downside) however to varsities, journalism, and the courts.

Whereas we don’t know what number of Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by people utilizing LLMs, it’s doubtless a considerable quantity. Knowledge safety firm Imperva reported that over half of all web site visitors in 2024 was non-human, largely attributable to LLMs. X’s personal bot Grok says: “The precise numbers aren’t public, however 2024 estimates counsel a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of bots on X.”

A number of cynics have steered that Altman’s lament was his first foray into advertising OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a venture to tackle X and Fb was on the earliest phases. This product might or might not exist. Altman might or might not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is just too pretend as of late.

However motives apart, if OpenAI is planning a social community, what are the percentages that it might be a bot-free zone? And, humorous sufficient, if it did the reverse and banned people, the outcomes doubtless wouldn’t be completely different. Not solely do LLMs nonetheless hallucinate info, however when researchers on the College of Amsterdam constructed a social community composed completely of bots, they discovered that the bots quickly shaped cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.